I have two quite simple enhancement to submit.
1) Antenna selection
Most wireless cards have two antenna connectors (MAIN / AUX); with non-“N” cards (i.e. “A/B/G”-mode cards), the single RF chain is switchable between the two connectors/antennas so to allow diversity selection: RouterOS never implemented (to the best of my known) this kind of diversity and just allows us to select which antenna to use; by the mean of the antenna-mode parameter we can select the antenna to use for both TX/RX or might choose one antenna for TX and the other one for RX. In the typical setup the user will use a single connector for both TX/RX and forget about the other one.
My proposal is to give more selection options for dual-band radio cards in order to connect a 2.4GHz antenna to one connector and a 5 GHz antenna to the other one, letting the driver to choose the proper antenna to use according to the selected frequency band. This would greatly simplify installations where a dual-band mode is required but the use of a single dual-band antenna would not be optimal; it also appears to be a good companion to the “Wireless Advanced Channels” feature (multi-band scan, etc.) announced in version 6.x.
The proposed feature mostly apply to non-“N” cards but might prove useful also on “N”-cards (assuming that only 1 spatial-stream is being used).
2) Antenna gain & cabling losses
The use of the regulatory domain feature in RouterOS requires that the antenna’s gain is properly specified into the wireless interface settings. In order to proficiently use such feature, the value specified for antenna-gain should take in account pigtails/cable/connectors loss: introducing such an additional parameter, i.e. “antenna-cabling-loss=3”, in “/interface wireless” would prove very handy and more “professional”.
Both the proposed features above could be integrated into a specific “antenna setup” configuration section: I’m available to further discuss this point, if you find any interest in it.
Regards,
rock